The "Handboek Joomla!" is a 148 page magazine dedicated to Joomla that is just about ready to go to print. The Dutch Joomla community has worked together with some international community members on the issue. Over 40 people contributed in some way to this magazine, which is made made by the Dutch Webdesigner magazine.

To create a successful Joomla website, you need several different skills. Building a Joomla site will challenge you in various areas, and you will learn a lot along the way. Still, there are some areas in which you should acquire at least some basic knowledge and proficiency before starting. These are some of the skills you will need:

Basic Joomla skills

HTML skills

CSS skills

Patience

Writing skills

SEO skills

In this post, I'll go through these skills and elaborate on what it all means.

Earlier tonight, the J.O.S.C.A.R.s award ceremony took place at J and Beyond 2012. The conference, which is now in progress in Bad Nauheim, Germany, has gathered over 200 people from almost 40 countries. And they are all here to share their knowledge, contribute to the project or learn something new to bring back home.

The awards ceremony was a lot of fun as always, featuring the duo Teeman and Drover in matching tuxedos. And later, Brian Teeman as the Elvis of Joomla in an outrageous costume worthy of the King himself.

I'm very happy to announce that one of my sites won an award this year, in the category for Best eCommerce website.

A reader asked me about this recently. What he wanted was to hide the "Home" menu item when on the frontpage of his site.

I must admit I haven't really been in the situation where I'd needed that. Still, there might be others that need the same functionality on their site. So here are a couple of solutions for hiding a menu item on a particular page.

Joomla, one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announces the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5. Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases.

During the last couple of years, the Production Leadership Team (PLT) has churned out quite a few versions of Joomla. This is great, but it leaves some users confused as to how to approach all these versions.

If you are one of them, reading this post will help you understand how the different versions of Joomla follow each other. And how to upgrade or migrate from each one.

After years of waiting, the new, major version of Virtuemart was released today. This new iteration of Virtuemart is completely rewritten, and is compatible with both Joomla 1.5 and 1.7 (soon to be 2.5).

Built on the Joomla MVC framework, VM 2.0 takes a long step forward in improving the most popular and widespread ecommerce solution for Joomla.

Every month, each of the major Joomla template clubs release a new template.

In this post, I take another look at the premium business Joomla templates released. This time for the month of November 2011. The post is a bit delayed, as we are already in December, but the templates are worth looking at nonetheless.

There are templates from Yootheme, RocketTheme, JoomlArt, Joomla Shack and Shape5 on display this month. Enjoy!

As it happens, readers email me about problems on their Joomla sites or about things they don't quite get. And I try my best to answer their questions. I don't have the time for doing specific support for every user that emails me, but sometimes a quick look at the site can help the user solve his problem easily.

Last week, a reader emailed me about some problems with the content on his site. For some reason, the content was showing nicely on all browsers except on Internet Explorer 8. Was I able to help?

The other day, I got an email from a reader about a problem with content in Joomla articles (more about that in another post). In the email, he mentioned he was using Joomla 1.5.20 (at the moment, 1.5.25 is the current version).

So, the first thing I told him was to upgrade his Joomla site to the latest version. At first, he hestitated. It's too hard! But after a few words of caution, he came around and changed his mind. And I think you should, too.

Yesterday, the main Joomla site, joomla.org, got a new design. The design has been in the works for quite a while, and finally it's here.

Personally, I think the new front page is a lot cleaner and structured in a better way than the previous one. It conveys a more professional and perhaps corporate (is that a good thing...?) look than before. Focus is on where to get Joomla, what is Joomla, who uses it, as well as news items from different sources. The news sections are easier to spot now, and you spend less time looking at the page to determine if something is new or not.

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